, , ': } i , ") ")) :' \ -'., .':-\" "'J ; ø- .' 1 , "'''' . ::" ';:f: -'1(.... +.:... J..'" 't;; .,; ,,'" " 88 .. ...... ; J/?' ..-.. '" ,....;. .... .......* "'" ", I" .:' ", 11(,. .tilr ,.. - . I " , J / .' :t/ :,VILJ J / I - , ">. i ..., """ I< '. I'. 1 . 11', \ \' '- I f , . ....It ' J ",. __ 1'" :. OtJE OF - ., :: " < I, RA RE TH05Ë ,,A , . ,f. '" " _ OCCASIONS - '- ....', :7 / , }IP 7 ". :tj -l ,., "'f' . f ',- ''t '%.. .'. ","" ": \.. : ", ,',. "."" tfr , ,/. '::''If/í dying, but for a long time they were silent, fearing that if they did speak out they would be expelled. Powerful Western governments were also silent. The United States, Britain, the Neth- erlands, France, Germany, Japan, the European Economic Community, the U ni ted Nations agencies said nothing. When the United States finally spoke out, it condemned the S.P .L.A. but did not criticize the Sudanese government, which surely deserved as much censure, if not more. Nor did the international press pursue the story as it had the famine in Ethiopia in 1984 and 1985. I t was not for lack of preparedness or information or food that the world failed to respond to the Sudanese fam- ine in time to save lives. The possibility of a war-induced famine in the south- ern Sudan has been a concern of West- ern governments and U.N. agencies since a drought and bad harvests in 1984 and 1985. In September of 1986, the U.N. announced Operation Rain- bow. Supported with money and food from eleven international donors, in- cluding the United States, it was pat- terned after Operation St. Bernarà., a successful airlift of food to Ethiopia during the famine there. But Operation Rainbow failed. The Sudanese govern- ment would not allow the U.N. to fly food and other supplies into areas con- trolled or under siege by the S.P .L.A. .:; \ '" . . What's more, the S.P.L.A. announced that it would shoot down any plane attempting to fly into J uba, the largest town in the south, and the threat had to be taken seriously, because a month earlier S.P .L.A. forces had used a mis- sile to shoot down a Sudan Airways plane with sixty people on board, all of whom were killed. A few months later, the Sudanese government expelled Win- ston Prattley, the director of the U.N .'s relief operations in Khartoum. Prattley had spent thirty-three years with the U.N., and was Secretary-General Javier Pérez de Cuéllar's personal rep- resentative in the Sudan. U.N. officials say that the expulsion of someone of his stature was without precedent. "The international community took that ly- ing down," a European diplomat re- called recently. "Noone stood up for Prattley: not the United States, not the European Community-nobody." His expulsion and the acquiescence of the international community cowed the private relief organizations. "It was a big blow to everybody's confidence here," says Mar k Duffield, the field director of Oxfam- U.K. in the Sudan. The message was clear: if the govern- ment could expel Winston Prattley, it could expel any humanitarian organi- zation-and it would. In the Sudan, Western officials con- tinued to monitor the situation closely. MARCH 13, 1989 The American Em- bassy in Khartoum kept Washington in- formed with a weekly "Southern Sudan Re- lief Status Report." The donor commu- nity-the U.N. agen- cies and the countries that were the major providers of develop- ment and emergency assistance to the Su- dan-met regularly. The most influential were the United States (the Sudan's largest I. ::. i benefactor); the N eth - erlands (second in giv- ing); the European Community (a close third); and Great Brit- ain (for historical rea- sons). The problem was never a lack of food; by 1986, the United States alone had more than one million one hundred thousand tons of grain in the Sudan. The problem was how to get the food to the people who needed it. Repeated efforts to do so failed. In 1987, for example, before the beginning of the rainy season, in June, when the roads would become impass- able, seven thousand tons of grain were sent to Raga, in Bahr el-Ghazal, for eventual delivery to Wau, a town a hundred miles east. "It disappeared," an American official told me in Oc- tober. In the summer of 1988, relief food still hadn't reached Wau; more than half the refugees there were severely malnourished; and the death toll was approaching three hundred a month. Back in May of 1987, the donors had begun pressing the government to send trains with relief food from Baban usa, a flat, dusty town of mostly one-story mud structures, to A weil, which is two hundred miles south. The government promised two trains a week, with a hundred cars per train. In late 1987, one train finally arrived in A weil, with three cars of relief food. By summer, a hundred people were dying every day. In January of this year, a second train arrived. In September of 1987, UNICEF and the U.N.'s World Food Program agency had sent a team to EI Meiram. It was a "desperate situation," Cole ", í .